designing a structural model for social media addiction based on the dark triad of personality: the mediating role of student social comparison

The use of the internet and social media has become an integral part of our daily lives; however, excessive use of these tools can lead to many psychological and social consequences. this study aimed to design a structural model for social media addiction (sma) based on the dark triad of personality (dtp) and through the mediating role of student social comparison. in this descriptive-correlational study, structural equation modeling (sem) was used to collect the data. the population consisted of all second-year high school students studying in kazerun county in the academic year of 2021-2022 (n=5200), of whom 384 individuals were selected as the sample using cluster sampling. the data were collected using the short dark triad scale (sd3; jones & paulhus, 2014), the social media addiction scale (tutgun ünal and deniz, 2015), and the adolescent social comparison scale-revised (ascs-r; xavier et al., 2014). the collected data were then analyzed in spss 26 and amos 24. the sem results showed that the variable of dtp explains 21% of the variance of social comparison. in addition, variables of dtp and social comparison were found to explain 28% of the variance of sma. the researchers offer suggestions for future studies based on the theoretical and practical findings on the concepts of sma, dtp, and social comparison.